


Ramrod (Remix)

by BerylFriday



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Western, F/F, Femlock, Post-Season/Series 03 AU, Wild wild West, cowpokelock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-01 08:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5199302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BerylFriday/pseuds/BerylFriday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(From the back cover of Ramrod)</p><p>SHOWDOWN!</p><p>Dead silence fills the town of Signal. You walk down Main Street, your hand on your gun. You watch the saloon doorway. You study the dark windows. Somewhere in Signal, Jim Moriarty is gunning for your boss, Mary Moristan... Minutes later Moriarty and Moristan meet. But Moristan spooks. She hasn't the guts to trade bullets with Moriarty. She leaves town. You're without a job. So you decide to pull up stakes. Then a hard voice rasps behind you, "You're drifting too, Holmes!" You look into Jim Moriarty's arrogant, mocking face — and all at once you know you're staying.... So you stay — and backing you is Johnnie Watson, a beautiful, ruthless woman who is out to destroy Moriarty at any cost!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter I

**Author's Note:**

> So my landlord has this thing for cars, and I have this thing for pulp fiction (the genre, not the movie), so he mentioned to my husband that he had a stack of books he was going to get rid of in the basement. I scurried down there and snapped up a few westerns and greaser hot rod tales to enjoy.
> 
> One particular book, Ramrod, by a Carolyn Keenesian fellow named Luke Short, was falling apart. Instead of tossing it, I decided I’d use it to practice some calligraphy using Sherlock quotes. I started reading it and had fun picturing it as a Johnlock AU
> 
> Then I started thinking about how Everything is a Remix and how it’d be fun to actually go ahead and put together some sort of gender-bendy wild-west remix of the book. So I think I’m going to do it, unless someone tells me I’m overlooking something critically wrong about the project. I’m hoping for your constructive feedback!

Sherlock Holmes reined up and let the buggy pass ahead of her on the narrow road entering the switchbacks that finally let down into Signal’s street. She noted indifferently that the lamp in Bondurant’s store window below was the only light in town against the early dusk.

Riding behind the buggy in the thin acrid dust kicked up by the loafing team he wondered briefly if the man and the girl in the buggy knew there was no turning back now. She thought Jonnie Watson knew it, and she had a fleeting admiration for the silence she had kept.

Mary Moristan put the buggy into the downgrade, and after that Sherlock thought nothing, only watched. There would be signs, if a man could read them, and he picked up the first one when the buggy leveled off abruptly at the head of SIgnal’s main street. Two horses branded D Bar were tethered at the rack outside the blacksmith shop, the first building on the street. They shut off any retreat this way. That was enough; and Sherlock saw Jonnie Watson turn her head and look obliquely at her, and she met her glance briefly, her sober face expressionless. She had seen too.

The buggy pulled up at the stone block in front of the hotel and Mary Watson stepped down. She looked about her in the dusk almost covertly, her glance raking the line of empty chairs on the hotel’s veranda. Watching him, Sherlock thought, from a deep wisdom of these things, That’s not the way it’ll come, and she moved up, still mounted, and put a hand out to hold the head-stall of the near horse.

Moristan, in her unaccustomed black suit that made her movements self-conscious, handed Jonnie out of the buggy and looked over at Sherlock. In her dark, reckless face was an uncertainty, and her eyes sought Sherlock’s.

“Put ‘em up at Lilly’s,” she said.

Sherlock nodded, and still Moristan looked at her, and Sherlock knew she was going to say something more and was trying to find words that would be casual enough.”

“You’ll be around, won’t you?”

“Sure,” Sherlock said. “Sure.”

Her glance shuttled again to Jonnie Watson, and met hers briefly, and she looked away. She knows, Sherlock thought. From the time Walt picked her up today, she’s known it was wrong. And she thinks I’ll help. She was very small and very straight standing there beside the block, and Sherlock raised a finger to her hat brim, and led the team away.

She passed Bondurant’s store now, and ahead of her the lights of the Special saloon lay dimly across the row of saddle horses ranked at the rail. She saw another horse from D Bar, but none from Bell, and she speculated narrowly on that as she passed the saloon. Jim Moriarty was waiting to tip his hand, as a man does who never brags.

The pattern was familiar, and as Sherlock pulled his team into the dark runway of Joe Lilly’s livery barn she had a brief, gray moment of premonition. There was nothing keeping her here except three weeks’ wages as an ordinary puncher and a kind of odd loyalty to a man who had helped him. She could turn this team over to Joe Lilly without a word and ride through the runway and out the alley to the cross street and make camp in the Federals tonight. He could put it behind him that easily.

Instead she pulled up the team beside the feed corral and dismounted, a tall lean woman in shabby range clothes with a young face more taciturn than its years warranted. There was a soberness about the straight mouth that was unbending and there was a suggestion of weathered gauntness in her freshly washed face. She lifted off her saddle and turned her horse into the corral, and by that time Joe Lilly had come through the runway. “Your boss came in, after all,” Joe observed.

The deep-set eyes, curiously green and unreadable, looked at Lilly for an uncomfortable moment. “After all what?” Sherlock said quietly.

Joe didn’t look at her. He said, “Nothin’,” and went on to the team, and Sherlock turned into the runway.

“Say,” Joe called, and Sherlock stopped and turned. “You owe me a week’s feed bill.”

“I haven’t been paid yet.”

“That’s all right,” Joe said. He seemed sorry he had mentioned it, and Sherlock went on through the runway.

The street was almost dark now and the smell of pine pitch from the Federals bulking blackly across the Bench to the west seemed to steal along the street, mingling with the odor of hot dust and the faint ammoniac reek of the stable.

Sherlock paused, and fashioned a cigarette, aware suddenly of the remoteness of this place, of the strangeness of these people, and he turned up the street. He saw Greg Lestrade, the sheriff, leave his dark box of an office opposite the saloon and cut across the road, angling toward him, and he slackened his pace.

Greg Lestrade was fifty, and not tall, and dry as an autumn leaf. There was a wintry chill in his gray eyes that the darkness hid now. He was also a friendless man, and for that reason Sherlock liked him.

Lestrade came up beside him and said, “Hi, boy,” and looked up the street first before he faced Sherlock, who said “Hello.” Neither of them spoke for a few moments, and then Lestrade said, “How do you feel now?” in a friendly voice.

“It took about a week, but I’m all right.”

“That was a bat,” Lestrade observed, without censure.

“I’ll buy you a drink,” Sherlock said. She saw Lestrade’s head turn to look at him again, and she said, “No, I’m all right. A drunk like that once in a lifetime is enough. I just want to buy you a drink.”

“I’d like one,” Lestrade said.

Sherlock fell in beside him now, and they walked toward the Special in silence. She was thinking of the seven nights that Greg Lestrade had hauled her, stupid with liquor, from the Special to the small jail behind his office. Lestrade had never reproved her, never locked her in, only watched her, Sherlock remembered, with a deep and sober pity. Lestrade had sensed, without ever speaking of it, her need for oblivion that was almost necessary for life. On the eighth day Lestrade had come into her cell and roused her and said, “Can you ride?”

At Sherlock’s nod, Lestrade tilted his head toward the door. “Circle 66 needs a hand. You better go out there. I told Shipley about you. Rest up for a few days.” She had not once asked a question, and Sherlock was grateful. That was three weeks ago.

They turned in at the Special now, where a big poker game was going on at one of the rear tables. The bar to the left was deserted, with the bartender watching the game. They bellied up to the bar and Burch Nellis, seeing them, came over, wiping his hands on his dirty apron.

At the sight of Sherlock, Burch looked at Lestrade as if to say, “Are we going through that again?” and Lestrade said, “All right, Burch. Whiskey.” He was a slight man in a baggy black suit, and yet he had never spoken without making a man feel his authority, as Nellis felt it now.

Sherlock bought a couple of cigars, and he and Crew stood side by side with their drinks. Bald Burch Nellis put his plump elbows on the back bar and regarded Sherlock with his soft sly eyes. “You look some better.”

“I feel better.”

“I bet you do,” Burch said agreeably. He grinned faintly and went back to observe the game.

Sherlock watched Lestrade in the back-bar mirror, noting the older man’s restlessness, and he knew it was the prospect of this trouble shaping up that made him so. For trouble would naturally bring memories to Greg Lestrade. His was a name that, a decade ago, had been known briefly to every man in the West. He had rammed law down the throats of a dozen railroad and mining towns, and tales of his cold courage still lingered in men’s minds. He was older now, burned out and tired and taciturn, and content with the oblivion of this remote sheriff’s office, and yet this trouble had the power to disturb him now. Sherlock saw it and wondered when he would speak.

It came on the second drink, when Greg Lestrade looked up and surprised Dave watching him in the mirror.

Lestrade grimaced, his chill eyes holding a fleeting humor for only a moment. “Why’d she bring Johnnie with her?”

“I wondered, too.”

“Can you get her out of town?”

Sherlock shook her head. “No. She wouldn’t go.”

Lestrade looked down at his drink, and he said softly, bitterly, “This is a stinking job. You stay out of it.”

“I work for him,” Sherlock said.

“Three weeks. What do you owe a fool like that? Your life?”

“Maybe.”

Lestrade sighed and said nothing.

Sherlock asked, “Moriarty in town?”

“He don’t play it that way,” Lestrade said wearily. “Jim never bothered to scare a man.”

Lestrade drank his whiskey then and put the glass down. “There’s no chance of moving Johnnie out of town, you think?”

“Ask her.”

Lestrade shook his head and said good-by and moved out into the street.

It was building up, Sherlock thought idly. It was the old, old pattern of pride, and a man could never leave it. If you worked for a man you fought for him, too, no matter if you thought he was a fool and didn’t believe in him. Strangely, she was dead to the passion behind all this. She put a coin on the bar and went out into the night, and headed upstreet again.

At Bondurant’s corner store she went in, but instead of turning toward the hardware side, she sought the other, where the household and dress goods lay on counters and shelves.

Martin Bondurant came toward him, his eyes polite and curious, and, because he sold clothes and had never found that they made the man, he spoke courteously to this shabbily dressed puncher. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“I work for Mary Moristan, and I haven’t drawn my wages. Is my credit good?”

“Certainly.” Bondurant inclined his head.

Bondurant went behind the counter and pulled several bolts of goods down. Sherlock picked a blue silk that she did not know was moire, and watched Bondurant measure it. She accepted the wrapped package with a faint, pleased smile on her straight lips, and did not even look at the receipt Bondurant gave her.

On the street again, she retraced her steps, passing the Special and the livery and the weed-grown vacant lot beyond. It was full dark now, and she was almost at the end of Signal’s business section, which covered an exact two blocks almost at the head of Signal Canyon.

There was a lone building ahead of her with a lamp burning by a window in the rear. Sherlock slowed her pace now and halted at the front door, which was flush with the boardwalk. She yanked the bellpull and heard its jangle in the rear. Idly now, she looked at the woman’s hat on its lone stand in the window below the letters crossing the upper panes Dresses & Millinery Made to Order.

Presently she saw the light approaching from a passageway in the rear of the small front room, and then it became steady, as if a lamp had been set on a table, and then the door opened.

“Evening, Molly,” Sherlock said, and took off her Stetson.

“Sherlock Holmes!” the girl exclaimed softly, pleased. Then she laughed softly too, and said, “Come in.”

Sherlock stepped inside and Molly Hooper closed the door behind her. She turned to face her then, and smiled in friendly welcome. She was a girl of medium height, modestly bosomed, with pale hair so thick it was almost untidy. She was wearing an apron now over her house dress, and her sleeves were half rolled. Her mouth was full, friendly, and there was a humor in her brown eyes now as she regarded Sherlock, hands on hips.

“This is the female part of my house, Sherlock. Come on back where we can sit down.” She went ahead of her, lifting the lamp from the table. Sherlock glanced briefly around the room, which had always made her uncomfortable. It smelled of dress goods, and was littered with remnants of them. Besides a long cutting table and a sewing machine, there were a couple of dressmaker’s dummies, some chairs, a stack of hatboxes and nothing else in the room.

At the far end of the passageway, on one side of which lay a tiny bedroom, was the kitchen-living room, and this room was the house. It reminded Sherlock of a hundred ranch kitchens he had known — the big wood stove sharing the back wall with the sink and the pump, the big dining table with its scattering of chairs, the worn sofa and table against the opposite wall.

Only the dark run underfoot and the bright curtains in the windows were different. Irene put the lamp down on the dining table, and Sherlock saw she had interrupted her supper.

“Have you eaten, Sherlock?” she asked.

When Sherlock lied and said that she had, Irene went over to the cupboard saying, “Not so much you can’t hold another cup of coffee.”

She poured thecoffee at the stove and set it on the table, and Sherlock sat down. Molly sank into her chair across from him and looked levelly at him. “How’s the new job?”

“Better than the one I had drinking the Special dry,” Sherlock answered.

Molly smiled faintly. “You didn’t do a bad job of that.”

“Where’s Irene?” Sherlock asked. She poured cream from a can into her coffee and stirred it, watching Molly.

She shrugged. “You know Irene. She’ll hang around town for a week drinking and playing poker and camping in my lap with some friend, and all of a sudden she’s gone.”

“Fiddle-footed,” Sherlock murmured.

Molly looked thoughtfully at Sherlock. “Where’d she pick you up, Sherlock? He never said.”

“I bought her a drink at the Special one morning. We both had the same idea about taking care of some whiskey, so we stuck together.”

“The only difference being,” Molly said slowly, “that Irene Adler likes to drink and you don’t.”

“Not much,” Sherlock agreed.

“You weren’t having fun,” Molly said. “You worried me.”

“No,” Sherlock said tonelessly. She was silent a moment, looking around the room. “I remember Irene and I almost lived in this room for a week, Molly. Why didn’t you throw us out?”

“Where would you have spent your time?”

“The Special. Anywhere. We wouldn’t have been camping on you, anyway.”

Molly smiled faintly. “But I liked it. You see, I have seven brothers, Sherlock. I like them — and I miss them. Folks like you and Irene Adler hit town and you want a drink and a woman’s company. Well, I like men, and I like them around. I like to feed them and I like their talk.” She laughed shortly. “They make me forget that for weeks on end all I do is talk to women about dresses and hats. That’s a fair exchange, isn’t it?”

“Fair enough,” Sherlock agreed. She reached for the package she had laid on the table and pushed it toward Irene, who looked inquiringly at her. “A present to a very good friend,” she said.

Irene unwrapped the package. When she saw the thick silk, like some rich metal under the lamplight, she gave a wordless exclamation of delight and slowly lifted her gaze to Sherlock. “It’s lovely, Sherlock — lovely!”

Sherlock felt the swift stab of memory that was like a pain, and Irene went on, “I’ve seen it at Bondurant’s, and I wanted it so badly I dreamed about it.” The rapture in her face abruptly vanished and her eyes widened like a child’s who has just remembered something unwanted. “But I can’t take it.”

The faint pleasure in Sherlock’s eyes died too, and Irene saw it. She leaned back in her chair and sighed.

“It’s sweet of you, Sherlock, but I can’t. Signal is just too small, and I’ve a reputation of sorts to keep.” She smiled wryly. “Already, Martin Bondurant has told his wife about the expensive silk some puncher bought. When I come out with a dress of the same silk, what will she say? And tell?”

“I never thought of that,” Sherlock said in a troubled voice.

Molly laughed then. “Bless you, I know you didn’t. It would take a woman to think of it.”

Sherlock grinned at her and shook her head, and they were silent a moment. Molly fingered the silk wistfully, her eyes upon it and yet not seeing it.

She said quietly, without looking at him, “You’re a good woman, Sherlock. Because you are, may I say something?”

Sherlock looked closely at her and nodded. Molly said, “You’re miserable. I would like to help you if I could.”

Sherlock was silent, and her face grew hard under the weight of her thoughts, and when Molly saw it she shook her head swiftly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Sherlock’s eyes, soft and bitterly musing, focused on her now and regarded her a brief moment, and her straight mouth softened. “You’re right, Molly. But it’s all right now.”

Molly smiled and looked at the silk again, stroking it. Then Sherlock began to speak and she looked up at her as she said in a low voice, “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know,” and she looked gravely at her. “I lost my wife years ago, Molly. We had a son. He was six last month.” Her voice turned hard now, with an edge of stubbornness that was the measure of the task of telling this. “I was buyin’ cattle in a small way, and I had to travel most of the time, so I left him with some people in town. While I was gone, their house burned. He was in it, sleeping, and they both died too, tryin’ to get him out.”

Molly didn’t say anything. There was pity and understanding and a deep sadness in her eyes. She sat motionless, watching Sherlock. She reached in her shirt pocket and drew out her sack of tobacco and fashioned a cigarette and put it in his mouth. She fumbled for matches, which she could not find, and Irene came to her feet and crossed to the stove and brought back the big box of matches and laid them beside her.

Sherlock looked up at her, standing beside him. “That’s why I wanted to thank you, Molly. The liquor wouldn’t kill it, and Irene Adler’s talk couldn’t wipe it out. I think it was you, putting up with us, laughing and taking Irene's teasing and her talk and not asking me questions that did it. It’s all right now.”

Molly smiled sadly and went back to her chair. “I think, Sherlock, if you don’t mind, I’d like the silk,” she said softly. “Thank you for telling me.”

Sherlock’s glance raised to the clock atop the cupboard, and she noted the time with brief, somber attentiveness. Afterward she drank her coffee, listened pleasurably to Irene’s talk. It took her back, this friendly low-pitched voice of Irene’s, to a time that was dead for her, to the first months after her marriage with Ruth. She had managed a loan from the bank and had got her land and had built her shack, and Ruth was carrying their child. She would come in only when darkness drove her, bone weary and wolf hungry, and when supper was finished she would sit thus, watching her, half-listening to her chatter of what she had done that day. At the time it was only pleasant, a woman rightfully in her home; since Ruth’s death, however, she had shut those memories from her mind with an iron will. And tonight, listening to Irene, she let herself remember, and strangely found no pain.

Presently she looked at the clock, and this time she rose. She stood, tall and lonely again, her brief pleasure ended, and Molly could see it. She picked up the lamp and led the way to the street door an unbolted it. Before she opened it, though, she turned to Sherlock and studied her searchingly. She said then, “You know the talk around town tonight, Sherlock?”

“Jim Moriarty?”

Molly nodded and said, “I didn’t want you to be surprised,” and opened the door.

Sherlock said good night and went out, and Irene stood in the door a minute, watching her until the night swallowed her up.

In the darkness now Sherlock halted, her attention not on the night. She was thinking of this girl, and the way she had told her of what lay ahead. Greg Lestrade, who had seen more death than a dozen ordinary men, could not have been more casual. There had been no pleading for carefulness, no fright, only a warning and a confidence unexpressed. She knew Sherlock would do what she had to do, and whether or not she liked it did not weigh with her.

Sherlock moved on again toward the scattered lights of the store and hotel and saloon, and now she felt a wary calmness. The stage was due in an hour, and beyond that time she did not speculate. She passed the livery stable and saw Lestrade in the darkened doorway of his office across the street watching the night, waiting for the men to fall into place, for the minutes to be spent. In front of the Special she saw another figure come out of the darkness by the doorway, head turned in her direction, looking toward the sound of her footsteps.

It was Mary Moristan, and when she saw Sherlock she exhaled her breath sharply. “Where have you been?” she asked irritably. “I thought you’d gone.”

“No,” Sherlock said quietly.

Moristan looked over her shoulder up the street and then said restlessly, “Let’s have a drink.”

(p. 13-22)

They went into the Special, where the poker game was still in progress. Mary got a bottle and glasses from Burch Nellis and led the way to one of the front tables. The players watched her covertly, saying nothing, and she knew they were watching. Seating herself, she thumbed her stiff new Stetson off her forehead and her glance restlessly roved the room. Sherlock, sitting, slacked in her chair, watched her and thought bleakly, She’s spooking already.

Nothing in Mary Moristan’s face gave her away, Sherlock thought, but it was there. Moristan was a pale woman, perhaps in her late twenties, with restless sharp blue eyes in her thoughtful face. She had a drive about her that would not let her rest, and it had reached into her very soul and turned into ambition. She was generous and impulsive, Sherlock had learned in the three week she had worked for her; she had a temper that flared like powder and died as quickly, but the bedrock of her nature Sherlock had never seen. She thought Johnnie Watson, the girl Mary was going to marry, had seen it and become uneasy. They would both see it tonight, anyway.

Moristan shuttled her bold glance to Sherlock and said, “He’s not here, is he?”

“No,” Sherlock said.

“He won’t be either,” Mary said brashly.

Sherlock didn’t answer, and Mary stared unswervingly at her. “You think he will?”

“Yes.”

Mary flushed a little and said, “I saw those two horses from D Bar. One is Red Cates’, Johnnie said. Red won’t move without Frank, and I haven’t seen a Bell horse in town.”

“That’s right,” Sherlock said pleasantly.

Mary said, suddenly bitter, “You seem pretty damn sure he’ll be here.”

Sherlock shrugged slowly. “I’ve seen Jim Moriarty.”

Mary said, “Ah-h-h,” softly, contemptuously, and poured herself another drink. Sherlock’s drink stood untouched and Mary, spying it, looked at Sherlock with frank curiosity. “Tell me,” she said, “are you afraid of booze now?”

Sherlock looked at her and then at the drink, and then picked up the whiskey and drank it. She had forgotten it was there.

Mary laughed the, her lips breaking swiftly, her teeth white and even. “That’s an answer.”

She leaned back now, her face altering into soberness, and regarding Sherlock carefully. “You know, you’re a queer one, Holmes,” she said slowly. “Damned if you aren’t. Don’t anything ever excite you?’  
“No,” Sherlock said.

“Can’t you talk?”

Sherlock grinned faintly. “Not very good.”

“Well, you’re lucky,” Walt said, her tone suddenly wry, and she did not need to explain herself. Long since, Sherlock had learned that Mary Moristan placed no value on words; she spoke off the top of her mind, and much of her life had been spent backing those words up. She was backing them tonight, but she was no longer sure of herself. That doubt was eating at her steadily, driving her to a new recklessness. She poured herself another drink and tilted the bottle inquiringly toward Sherlock, who shook her head in refusal. Moristan took her drink and coughed once from the rawness of it, and then said, without looking at Sherlock, “Johnnie’s over at the hotel. She wants to see you.”

Sherlock was silent a moment, hiding her surprise. Johnnie Watson had never spoken with her, other than to pass the time of day. She had been just one of three hands working for Circle 66, the object of more than passing curiosity for a few days, because of the circumstances under which she had been hired. A deep caution stirred in Sherlock. “Why?” she asked.

“She’s got a notion I’ll need help.” Mary’s sardonic glance shuttled to Sherlock. “Don’t scare her, but go see her, will you?”

Sherlock rose reluctantly and went out. Her pace toward the hotel was slow, and once, beyond Bondurant’s store, she halted. This was not a woman’s quarrel, and she should not even be in town, and she did not want to talk to her. The pattern of this was as old as life, and nothing she could say would change it.

However, she went on, an odd resentment stirring within her. The hotel lobby, with its dozen deep leather chairs, was deserted; from the hotel saloon next door, joined to the hotel by a connecting door, came the slow murmur of voices.

Sherlock went to the desk and looked at the register and went upstairs. At the head of the stairwell he knocked on a door marked A, knowing it was the parlor and bedroom suite which a cattleman invariably took for his womenfolk while he was about town. There was a short wait and then the door was opened by Johnnie Watson. She stepped aside and said quietly, “Come in, Sherlock.”

Sherlock took off her Stetson and tramped into the room. Her black, short hair, only shades darker than the deep brown of her face, was awry and somehow gave her, with her shabby calico shirt and levis, the appearance of a shiftless puncher.

“Sit down, please,” Johnnie Watson said, and Sherlock sank into an upholstered chair by the table where the lamp stood. Johnnie Watson sat down in a rocking chair facing him, and Sherlock watched her guardedly. She had, without wholly knowing it, a deep respect for this girl. It stemmed from her appearance; she was small, ramrod straight, and she had the unconscious pride of her size that Sherlock usually associated with a small man. If this pride bordered on arrogance, a man forgot it when he looked at her. She was truly beautiful, but the perfection of it was redeemed by flaws that made her the more charming. Her straight nose, for instance, was marred by a few faint freckles that conjured up a picture of a tomboy. Her eyes were a green-blue that was neither color, and her hair was blonde and silver, with a wildly unruly curl. Sherlock had seen her wear the same dress four days running, so she knew she cared nothing about clothes, and yet she wore them like a princess, and D Bar, her brother’s outfit, was prosperous and freehanded. It was these small things and something else — a genuine sweetness in her speech, a character in her every movement, and a kind of shyness in her rare smile — that formed Sherlock’s respect. And this very respect bred a caution now as she watched her lean forward in her chair and, manlike, put her elbows on her knees and lace her fingers together.

“Let’s get a lot of lumber out of the way, shall we, Sherlock? she began. “First, you look like a bum and you were drunk like a saloon rowdy, and you’re indifferent to what anyone thinks of you — but you’re not a bum. I know that, so don’t pretend.”

Sherlock crossed her legs uneasily, and a fleeting humor touched her face and she said nothing.

“You’re the only one that’s stuck by Mary. Did you know Leach and Harvey quit Circle 66 today? Mary didn’t send them anywhere, like she told you. They quit.”

Sherlock nodded, unsurprised.

“You’re the only hand left. Why didn’t you leave?”

“She helped me when I needed it.”

Johnnie nodded imperceptibly. “That’s what I wanted to know.” She rose and walked slowly to the window that looked out on the veranda roof and the dark street. She stood there a moment, and then turned to Sherlock. “You’ve got to help me.”

Sherlock didn’t speak.

“Mary thinks Jim Moriarty was bluffing when he said he would never let Mary take that stage tonight. Do you?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

Sherlock shook her head slowly. “Nothing.”

“You’ve got to.”

Sherlock’s voice was almost irritable. “You don’t understand it. Mary says she’s going to bring sheep into a country. She says it in a saloon to a bunch of tough cattlemen. She tells them the day she’s going out to buy the sheep and she dares any one of them to stop her, and Jim Moriarty says he will.” She paused, watching Johnnie. “The day comes to go out. He She either goes or she doesn’t go. There’s nothing any man can do about that. The wrong is already done.”

“What wrong? Sheep?”

“No.” Her voice became dry now and she still watched Johnnie. “If I wanted to bring sheep into a country I would bring them in. I would not dare a man to stop me. Neither,” she added bluntly, would you.

“No,” Johnnie said softly. She came back to the table and regarded her, her eyes thoughtful. “What will happen? How many will there be?”

“I saw a couple of D Bar horses downstreet. That means your Dad has given his men the sign?”

“No,” Johnnie said immediately. “That’s Red Cates and Will Owen. They’ll stay clear.” She hesitated. “I told Dad if a D Bar man got in this trouble tonight, I would never set foot in his house again.”

“Then Jim Moriarty,” Sherlock said.

“Alone?”

Sherlock nodded and came to her feet, and Johnnie walked around the table to her. She stood close to Sherlock, looked up into his eyes. “Will you back Mary up?”

“I work for her,” Sherlock said simply.

She saw the swift relief mount in Johnnie’s eyes, and she stepped back. “Thank you, Sherlock.”

She nodded to her and tramped over to the door and had her hand on the knob when Johnnie said quietly, “Sherlock.” She paused, and Johnnie stepped beyond the lamplight, so that her face was in darkness. “What if Mary does — take the stage? What if she does bring in sheep?”

Sherlock smiled narrowly. “She won’t have to bring them in. If she makes the stage tonight, she’ll own the Bench.”

She didn’t say any more and Sherlock turned the knob. A sound in the street, faint but distinct, came to him, and she listened. It became clearer then, and she recognized the sound. It was the stage, pulling in from West Station at the end of its long haul through the Signal Brakes to the east. It would pass the hotel and pick up fresh teams at Joe Lilly’s, and then come back to the hotel for its passengers before it climbed the grade, crossed the Bench and moved on over the Federals.

Johnnie Watson heard it too; she went to the window to look out and Sherlock stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind her. Johnnie Watson, she thought idly, was a tough girl. She had cut old Harry Watson, her brother, out of this fight tonight with an ultimatum that he could not accept. She had tried to give Mary Moristan courage by her very presence. And, finally, she had made sure of her own loyalty, had extracted Sherlock’s promise, which would not have been necessary, that she would back up her man. A woman could not do any more for her lover except fight his battles, Sherlock thought, and she admired her.

Going down the short stairs then, she knew that, whether she liked it or not, her own fate lay irrevocably for the next few minutes at the mercy of Mary Moristan’s unstable temper, and she accepted it tranquilly.

For young Mary Moristan was hungry, and she couldn’t wait. She’d got Johnnie Watson, so she’d have D Bar some day. But her own small spread edging into the rich grass of Signal Bench was not enough; she looked about her at the big outfits like D Bar and Jim Moriarty’s Bell and she schemed, and all the time she did not see that big outfits were only tolerating her because she was small. But because she was going to marry Harry Watson’s girl she had demanded equality, and when it was refused, she had threatened to bring in sheep. It was her bid for a big chunk of the Bench, since sheep and cattle would not mix. No one who heard her was her friend after that, and it had taken Jim Moriarty to put their dislike into words. That was two weeks ago. Tonight, she must make good her brag, and Sherlock, like it or not, was backing her.

The lobby seemed empty as she stepped down into it, but in the far shadows at the corner window she made out the stooped figure of the hotel clerk watching the street. Other people, behind other windows, watched too, afraid and excited and safe.

Stepping out into the gloom of the veranda then, she put her back against the wall and reached for her tobacco. A minute afterward, Mary Moristan crossed the side street and came up the hotel steps. She saw Sherlock in the darkness and went on in.

Sherlock’s attention narrowed now, and she stepped up to the veranda railing and looked down the street. In the shadows of the sheriff’s dark office he saw a movement, and she knew this was Greg Lestrade biding his time, impersonal as death. A handful of men from the Special were drifting across the road to the deep black of some cottonwoods where there was a horse trough.

Her glance traveled upstreet now, and after long seconds of peering into that gloom, the shape of a man suddenly took form. He was standing at the end of the boardwalk where it petered out into the thick dust around the blacksmith shop, his shoulder against the corner of the building. His shape was blocky and implacable and somehow patient as an Indian’s. Jim Moriarty was a man of his word.

Sherlock faded back into the half-light of the veranda again, this time on the other side of the door, and finally touched a match to his cigarette.

The stage, with its fresh teams, came out from Lilly’s, passed the side street and then drew up by the stepping block.

The driver, primed by Joe Lilly’s gossip, glanced unsteadily at the veranda and then, his foot on the brake, yelled, “Hooper!”

It could have been prearranged, but Sherlock thought not. At the mention of his name, the clerk scurried out the door and down the steps, Mary Moristan’s valise in her hand. She passed it wordlessly to the driver and scurried back up the steps and into the safety of the lobby. The whole action did not take fifteen seconds, and Sherlock smiled faintly around her cigarette.

There was a bare moment of silence again, broken only by the stage team’s impatient jangling of their bit chains, and then the solid warning of Moristan’s footsteps crossing the lobby.

Sherlock moved a little away from the door, and Mary came out. She paused just outside the door and saw Sherlock and said softly, “All right,” and then they both saw Greg Lestrade at the same time. He was angling across from his office to the hotel at a leisurely pace.

Mary watched Lestrade with still curiosity. She started to move, stopped, and then, her will sufficient, she went on down the steps. At the same time Sherlock’s glance shuttled to the edge of the veranda upstreet. In less than a second, Jim Moriarty’s blocky body moved out of the shadow toward the stage.

Mary Moristan saw him and halted, and Moriarty halted too. Moriarty spoke, his voice toneless. “Made up your mind, sheepman?”

Moristan stood in the middle of the broad boardwalk. By this time Greg Lestrade, walking slowly, was on the walk too, and he came up behind Mary and climbed the steps and waited.

“I’m going,” Mary said. Her voice was not in its normal register; a kind of wildness made it sing.

“No,” Jim Moriarty said.

Sherlock moved away from the wall, and at the same time she flipped her cigarette away from her. It arched out onto the boardwalk and fell at Jim Moriarty’s feet, a plain warning of Sherlock’s presence. Jim Moriarty said, “I see you, Drunk,” and he turned his head, tilting it up a little to see Sherlock, and a brief dim light from the lobby touched it. It was a cold square face and it might have been blocked out of granite, and the arrogance of its full jowls and broad, thin-lipped mouth was regal. The gesture of looking at Sherlock held a magnificent contempt, as if what Mary Moristan might do when Moriarty’s attention was diverted was not worth consideration. The man, Sherlock thought narrowly, did not know fear.

Placidly, almost, Moriarty turned his head to regard Mary again. His massive shoulders moved a little under his black coat, and he did not speak. The silence ribboned on, until it was almost unbearable, and Sherlock knew swiftly that it would have to break soon.

And then Mary Moristan said, in hot anger, “Listen, Jim! You ain’t God! You can’t keep a lady off a stage!”

Sherlock felt a slow sick shame flood over her. It was over. Mary was not going, and those hot, angry words held a sentence she would never escape as long as she lived.

Jim Moriarty knew it was over too; he said calmly to the stage driver. “Throw down his valise, Harry. She ain’t goin’.”

Greg Lestrade turned away then and went down the walk and out into the road. He, too, knew it was over. The driver, as if waiting for Greg Lestrade to pull out, tossed Mary’s bag to the boardwalk. He hesitated for one brief second, then kicked off his brake and whistled shrilly to his horses, and the stage pulled away toward the grade.

Jim Moriarty turned and walked back in the direction of the blacksmith shop, his broad back to Mary Moristan. He had dismissed Mary from his mind.

Mary Moristan stood irresolute for a moment longer, then mounted the steps and walked past Sherlock into the lobby. She did not look to either side of her, but headed for the stairs.

A remote sadness stirred within Sherlock. An ordinary person could hide her weaknesses from others by a decent silence, but Mary Moristan’s weakness lay naked now before all; it would ride her until it killed her. And it would kill her sure, Sherlock knew, for Mary Moristan was a coward.

Wearily, then, Sherlock went into the lobby and the clerk came up behind the desk. They did not look at each other, as if the shame of watching this was somehow unspeakable.

“Twelve suit you?” the clerk said.

“Sure.”

Sherlock took the key and went upstairs. Johnnie Watson’s door was closed, and Sherlock speculated on that. Had Mary gone to her, who was stronger than herself?

Her room was on the front corner, small and hot and dark. She closed the door and did not light the lamp, but crossed to the windows and opened them, and threw her hat on the washstand.

She paced once to the other window and then lay down on the bed and slowly fashioned a cigarette and lighted it. Her time was up here, she knew. She owed Mary Moristan nothing, having paid her debt tonight. And if she remained she would be basically senseless. For nothing is more private than ambition; a rare man could share it and fire other men with his own, but Mary Moristan was not that man.

Sherlock began to speculate with a faint interest as to Mary Moristan’s failure and its causes and she thought she understood them. The direct cause, of course, was Moristan’s tongue; she had made a wild brag she could not back up.

After tonight this country would turn on her, as both strong men and strong dogs turn on a proved weakling. They would trump up prior claims to her grass and her water, and her few cattle would vanish, and all the time they would bait her with a patient cruelty. Some day, Mary would decide she had taken enough, and on that day she was dead. So were those with her.

Sherlock put her cold cigarette on the marble-topped washstand and sat up on the edge of the bed. Tomorrow she would drift. It didn’t matter where, because she was rootless and one place was like another. She’d used up her luck and she’d made his fool drunken protest to whatever gods there were, and she was as right as she would ever be.

Rising now, she walked to the window and stood looking at the night. The street below her lay almost in darkness. She had lived through her own private hell in this town and had come out of it, and in doing it she had made some friends. But Greg Lestrade didn’t need her, and Irene would forget her. Johnnie Watson had got what she wanted out of her, which she had given in payment for Mary Moristan’s help. That left Mary, and she’d paid her back that debt. The slate was clean, and leaving would not be bad.

A woman came out from the shadow of the veranda below, heading downstreet. Sherlock followed her progress with a sleepy half attention, and then she came alert. She studied the figure closely, and then knew it was Mary Moristan. She stood there a full five seconds, speculating and rejecting. Moristan wouldn’t hunt up Moriarty, who was probably at the Special, for a shoot-out. It would take longer than this for her to get her nerve back.

Sherlock turned, swept up her hat and stepped out into the corridor. On the dark street below, she walked swiftly past Bondurant’s, and when she came to the Special, she moved close to the window. It was a big, many-paned window whose lower half was painted an opaque white.

Standing on tip-toe, she looked over the painted section. Moriarty and Red Cates, D Bar’s foreman, and Ed Burma, Moriarty’s foreman, were all standing at the bar, and the poker game in the rear had been resumed. Everything was serene.

Sherlock looked downstreet and then went on. She was almost to the entrance of the livery barn when she heard the booming racket of a horse coming toward her on the runway.

Fading back into the deep shadow of the building, she waited a moment and presently Mary Moristan, riding a livery horse, came out.

She did not turn toward the grade, which was the way home to Circle 66. She turned south, and presently, when she was in front of Irene Adler’s millinery shop, she lifted her horse into a canter and vanished south into the night.

It occurred to Sherlock then that maybe she had missed the measure of Moristan’s determination. Perhaps Mary was going out for the sheep after all. And then Sherlock knew that was unlikely, and she turned back toward the hotel.

Johnnie Watson, she knew then, was not going to have a wife soon.

###


	2. Chapter II

The morning came cold and gray. Sherlock got her breakfast at a restaurant down the cross street, which held a harness show, a lumber yard, the bank, Bondurant’s big warehouse, and a barber shop before it petered out into a cluster of small shacks that stretched almost to Feather Creek and the far wall of the canyon.

Afterward, Sherlock picked up the team and buggy at Lilly’s, hitching them herself, and drove over to the hotel. Tying the team at the hitchrail, she came up to the veranda and took a chair in the corner, and was smoking her second cigarette and watching the morning traffic of the town when Johnnie Watson came out.

Sherlock rose. Johnnie saw her and came over to her and said good morning. Sherlock observed her, and a slow shock came to her; she was deathly white, and as she sat down in the chair next to her own she saw that her face was utterly lifeless, without any expression at all. She was still standing some moments later when she looked up at her, and her gaze was so searching it made Sherlock uncomfortable.

She said finally, “Mary’s gone. You know she is, don’t you?”

Sherlock nodded. Johnnie reached in the bosom of her dress and brought out a piece of paper and handed it to her without comment. Sherlock opened it it and read:

Johnnie, that’s the kind of a beating I can’t take. The outfit was made over to you long ago. Take it, and luck. Forget me. Mary.

Sherlock folded it and handed it back to her, and she said “Well?” and she knew suddenly that she must shock Johnnie out of this. It seemed to her that only a thin thread of will kept her from going to pieces, and she said roughly, “What did you expect her to do?”

“Marry me!” Johnnie countered passionately, bitterly. “Not stick a note under my door and run!”

The anger brought some color into her cheeks, but the cold mask of her face did not change. She regarded the street now, her eyes musing and bitter. Sherlock sat down on the veranda railing, watching her guardedly, wonderingly.

“She wasn’t hard enough,” Johnnie said finally. “I made a lot of excuses for her last night, but this is the only truth. She wasn’t hard enough.” she glanced up at Sherlock. “Was she?”

“No.”

“And I am,” Johnnie said coldly.

Sherlock didn’t say anything, but she felt an acute unease. This wasn’t the soft, sweet Johnnie Watson that the whole Bench loved — or was it? She recalled last night, and how Johnnie had maneuvered several of them, including herself, into positions that would help Mary Moristan. She was right; she was hard.

“I’m hard enough,” Johnnie announced grimly, “to beat my brother and Jim Moriarty both,, and I’m going to.”

Sherlock shifted her feet, faintly embarrassed, and her movement brought Johnnie’s glance around to her. “I want you to work for me, Sherlock.”

“Work for you?” Sherlock asked blankly.

“I’m through with D Bar,” Johnnie said flatly. “I’ve only wanted one thing in my life, and that was Mary Moristan. My brother, with Jim Moriarty, took her away from me. All right, I can fight too. I’m going to take Circle 66, and I’ll make it into an outfit they’ll have to respect. I want you to run it.”

“No,” Sherlock said immediately.

“Why not?”

“You’re not thinking straight,” Sherlock murmured. “Harry Watson and Jim Moriarty didn’t take Mary away from you. They’re fightin’ sheep, like any cattleman.”

“Jim Moriarty has asked me to marry him once a month for two years. Harry wanted me to marry him. And if Harry wasn’t against my marrying Mary, why didn’t he help her long ago?” Her eyes were blazing with anger, but her voice was soft.

“After last night, you think he was wrong about Mary?”

“I don’t think that matters. What does is that anyone I choose will be broken by my brother and Jim Moriarty. They’re big enough and they’ll find a reason like they found sheep a reason to break Mary. They hope that some day I’ll turn to Jim and marry him.”

Sherlock was silent, no longer surprised at her cold passionless anger, and Johnnie went on. “I won’t let them do it. I’ve got some money left me by my mother — enough to pay a woman to stay with me and buy some cattle and hire a crew.” Her voice altered, taking on an edge. “When I get through with them, they won’t be able to break anybody.”

The sound of a rider in the street made them both glance in that direction. A big man on a big dun pulled up at the tie rail. It was D Bar’s foreman, Phil Anderson, and he touched the brim of his Stetson with a finger, and said, “You want me to drive you out, Johnnie?”

The word had got around then, Sherlock thought, but Johnnie’s pleasant voice did not betray any knowledge of it. “I’ll drive out alone, Phil. Thanks.”

Phil Anderson’s glance shifted briefly to Sherlock. He had a long, heavy-boned face, with a great beak of a nose bisecting it, and there was the faintest of thin, sly smiles on his face as he nodded and pulled his dun around and started back for the Special.

Sherlock was surprised to see Johnnie watching Phil, a hard amusement in her eyes. “Anderson too,” she murmured. “Anderson especially.” She straightened up suddenly and said briskly, “What about it, Sherlock?”

“No,” Sherlock said quietly. “If I can draw my wages from you today, I’m drifting.”

“Why?”

“It’s not my fight.” Sherlock shook her head. “You want a woman that don’t give a damn.”

Johnnie looked searchingly at her. “And you do? I don’t believe it because I watched last night from the lobby.” She stood up and Sherlock rose too. “It’s too bad, because we’d make a pair. You tell Mr. Bartholomew at the bank I said to give you your wages.” She put out her hand, which, when Sherlock took it, seemed small and warm and dwarfed in her own. “If you change your mind, come back. As long as I have 66 you’ll have work — but not if you give a damn.”

She went into the hotel and Sherlock watched her straight proud walk. “She’s an Injun, and she’s headed for trouble, he thought, and, oddly, he admired her. She had taken her beating without flinching, but she was going to fight back. Mary Moristan had been the only deciding factor in her decision, and the logical coldness with which she planned revenge was the measure of her spirit.

Sherlock went down the steps to the corner. She saw Greg Lestrade crossing the street to the Special, and she waved and Lestrade waved back. Turning down the cross street toward the bank, she looked at the town with that feeling close to nostalgia which one feels for a place that has witnessed a turn in her life. Signal was a drab little cow town, and yet it was more than that. She thought of Johnnie’s offer, turning it over once more in her mind. No, it wasn’t for her. Some obscure, unexpressed code of ethics had never let her admire a woman who fought without passion behind her. And Signal Bench, after helping her, had let her alone. Even Jim Moriarty’s cold epithet last night could be forgotten; a man up against three others did not have to choose his words.

At the bank Sherlock received her pay, and came back and crossed the street to Bondurant’s and settled her bill for dress goods.

Again she was on the main street, and now she remembered Greg Lestrade, to whom she would say good-by. She turned into the Special and saw several men at the bar, among them Phil Anderson and Jim Moriarty and Moriarty’s foreman, Ed Burma. Greg Lestrade stood at the bend of the bar at its far end hunched over a drink. Burch Nellis was busy behind the bar, and when he looked up Sherlock nodded to him and Burch said “Howdy.”

Sherlock passed a couple of men at the head of the bar and was almost alongside Jim Moriarty when Phil Anderson, next to Moriarty, half came around and drawled, “Hear your boss lit a shuck.”

Sherlock halted and laid her slow gaze on Philip Anderson. Jim Moriarty looked over his shoulder at her, his bold dark eyes arrogant and amused. “Did he?” Sherlock asked.

Anderson looked at Moriarty and grinned and glanced back at Sherlock. “You’ll have to get a new sucker to pay for your drunks now, booze-head.”

Sherlock regarded him and said quietly, “I’d go careful, Anderson.”

Phil glanced over at Moriarty and grinned. “Sounds like Moristan, doesn’t she?”

“No,” Sherlock said gently. “She just talked.”

“So do you.”

Sherlock hit him. With her open palm she batted Anderson across the mouth, and then stood there, watching the surprise and fury wash into Cates’ face.

“I don’t even like to talk,” Sherlock murmured.

For a still second, Phil Anderson stood rooted, his hand rising to his face in reflex action, and then he lunged at Sherlock in blind rage. They met with an impact that shook the room, and Sherlock slashed savagely at Phil’s midriff. Anderson’s impetus carried them both back, and then Sherlock wheeled to one side and Phil, still going, fell to his hands and knees on the floor.

He came up, cursing, and Sherlock, hands at her sides, watched him coolly. Phil came in slugging then, swinging great, rounding wild blows. Sherlock stepped inside his swing and hit Phil once in the face, and then Phil’s fist hit her in the neck. Phil opened his hand and gripped Sherlock’s neck and spun her around and away from him. The chair tripped Sherlock and she went over backward into the table and upset it. A cascade of cards and chips showered down over her, and she scrambled to her feet, and this time she went in. It was a cold, savage stalking, and Phil hit her twice in the head, and Sherlock took the blows, and when he was close enough she slashed Phil in the face with a turning, driven fist. Phil’s head went back and Sherlock hit him again in the face, and again, and then Phil’s knees folded. He wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s waist and hugged her to keep from falling, breathing in great sobs of air.

Sherlock brought up her knee savagely in Phil’s chest, and still Phil hung on, and now SHerlock buried a hand in Phil’s dun-colored hair and pried his head back and drove a wicked, down-driving smash into Phil’s face. She felt the shock of the blow across her knuckles and she felt Phil’s nose mashh under his hand, and then Phil’s hold loosened. Sherlock stepped back, and Phil, with nothing propping him up, dropped on his face. The sound of his head rapping the floor was a dull heavy sound, and a man back at the bar cried out involuntarily.

Anderson did not move, and Sherlock stood watching him, feet planted wide apart, breathing deeply. It was apparent to every man in that room that Phil Anderson, from the moment he lunged at Sherlock, had never had a chance, and that knowledge held them mute.

Sherlock’s wintry glance lifted to Jim Moriarty, and they looked at each other a long moment.

Jim said, “A man would never do that to me.”

“Or me,” Sherlock said.

Moriarty pushed away from the bar and came over to stand above Phil. His blocky body was motionless, save for the foot with which he tried to toe Phil over and failed. His gaze, bold and speculative, rose to Sherlock now, and his square stubborn face, brown and smooth and underlaid with heavy muscle, altered faintly into curiosity. “You joined up with the wrong outfit,” he murmured. “That’s a pity.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too late now. You’re drifting.”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” Moriarty said calmly. “We decided that. No man who ever worked for an outfit that talked sheep is hired here. We told Leach and Harvey. So now you go too.”

“When I’m ready.”

Moriarty shook his head. “Remember,” he said mildly, and turned to two of the men at the bar and demanded help in a quiet, imperative voice.

Sherlock picked up her Stetson and put it on and tramped out of the bar. Stopping on the boardwalk just beyond the door, she laid her glance along the street and gingerly felt her knuckles. She heard a man come out of the saloon behind her, and also heard the footsteps cease, and she looked over her shoulder to find Greg Lestrade, shoulder against the door jamb, watching her. Lestrade’s chill gaze held a feeling Sherlock remembered. She had seen it before, when Greg Lestrade had put her to bed those nights, and it was pity. It angered Sherlock now and deepened a growing obstinacy within her.

“That’s one way to make a woman take out a homestead here,” Sherlock murmured.

“But there’s lots of country other places,” Lestrade observed.

“You too?”

“Oh, no,” Lestrade said quietly. The look of pity was still there. “It would just save trouble,” he murmured.

“Who for?”

“Both of us.”

Sherlock said, “Well, you get paid,” and turned, but not toward the livery stable. The buggy she had brought up to the hotel was still there, and she headed for it.

Approaching the veranda she saw Johnnie Watson coming down the steps, and when she saw her something in her bearing made her pause. She stood on the second step, and Sherlock came up to her and stopped and asked, “That job still open?”

Johnnie nodded.

“You got a foreman,” Sherlock said.

 ****###


	3. Chapter III

Chapter III

Sherlock took the grade road out of Signal, and presently, a mile or so beyond, she left it and headed out across the flats toward the Federals. Later in the morning, when she had achieved the foothills, she stopped to blow er horse and looked back at the Bench. Its rich carpet of grass, the edges ragged where the black foothills timber knifed into it, stretched deep to the south. Over against the foothills, in the direction of Jim Moriarty’s Bell, a tall dust-devil reeled slowly into the foothills, and was broken. Harry Watson’s D Bar lay out of sight behind a tawny ridge that jutted deep into the Bench as far as American Creek, and lay between him and Bell; and over the ridge too, but far to the west, was Circle 66. This north end of the Bench was poor graze; from here a man could see why, for the grass lost its color even under the morning’s gray sky and the land broke more sharply into mottled rocky upthrusts. This was the country of the small outfits like Circle 66, but there was this difference between them; a man could reach out here for miles, and get only a hardscrabble range. Circle 66, at the far end of the Bench, would reach out into the real grass that these ten-cow outfits would never have.

Sherlock put her horse into a walk again, and presently rounded a shoulder of bald rock and approached a shack and corrals beyond. She found a nameless homesteader out by the pole shed, declined the offer to light, and asked, “Seen Irene Adler?”

“She was by a week ago,” the homesteader said. “Try Swatzel. He’s got a girl Irene cottons to, I hear.”

Deeper into the foothills, at a shack even more dilapidated than the first, Sherlock talked to a pretty girl who said, “I ain’t seen her and don’t want to,” and went back into the house.

Sherlock kept on toward the Federals, and now he thought of the strangeness of her errand. This morning she had been ready to ride out of Signal to the east. A few spoken words, a brief violence, and her life was altered. Thinking of those words, she wondered at herself. She did not endow Phil Anderson’s words with any meaning; the man was a bully, and had taken a bully’s beating. But Jim Moriarty’s words were different. They ate at a gal, and nagged at her pride, so that if she needed them she could never rid herself of them. She could have laughed at Jim’s words and ridden out of Signal, and no man, save perhaps Greg Lestrade, would have remembered they were spoken. Yet they had touched her at a time when her pride was sore inside her. For she had considered herself a beaten woman in these past weeks, and the discovery that she was not beaten, and that there was a new hope in her, was too new for her to accept Jim’s arrogance. She had acted with the unthinking anger of a woman newly discovering freedom, and she was not sorry.

In midafternoon she was in the vaulting black timber of the Federals on a trail she was not familiar with. It would lead, however, as all trails in the Federals eventually led, to Relief. This was a settlement of five buildings buried in a clearing up close to the pass and off the stage road. It had started out as a summer meat camp for the Indians across the Federals, and once a stage load of travelers caught in an early blizzard in the pass had spent a week there and named it. A horse trader had put up a place afterwards and was hanged a year later after both the Indians and the Bench outfits discovered he was stealing from one and selling to the other with equal impartiality. Now it was the clearinghouse for all the business the Bench did not want to transact in the open, a furtive place where a man could buy a meal and a drink and a bed, and if he was going through, a horse without an accompanying bill of sale. It was the sort of place, Sherlock knew, that Irene Adler would hit once a month in that restless, fiddle-footed way of his.

She came up on it in late afternoon. The gloom of the tall pines suddenly lessened, and then Sherlock saw the clearing ahead. A wagon road led past a log shack and a tangle of corrals whose poles were caved in and useless. Beyond it and across the road was a grayed two-story clapboard building that had never been painted, save for the faded letters of the legend Hotel across its false front. There was a log lean-to next to it which was the bar, and then the wagon road passed between a couple of good-sized barns and vanished south into the timber again.

As Sherlock rode past the shack she saw a man who had been sitting on the hotel porch rise and go in.

She dismounted at the hotel and climbed the steps and went inside. The tiny lobby, holding a couple of broken-backed chairs and the desk in the corner under the stairs, was deserted.

Sherlock saw the door leading into the lean-to bar, and she tramped over to it, her footsteps echoing hollowly on the floor. Poking her head inside, she observed the man who had just stepped in now at the bar reading a newspaper. The room measured about twelve by fourteen, and held only the short bar and a big round table for cards.

The man, who was bald, looked up now from his paper and nodded, and Sherlock came up to the bar and said, “I’m lookin’ for Irene Adler. Seen her?”

The bartender shook his head, and Dave regarded him carefully. He wore a vest over a collarless striped shirt that was a rich dirty gray at the cuffs and neckband. His face was thin and sallow and he had a kind of bland gall in his eyes that was a barrier to a man trying to read his thoughts.

He said lazily, “Nope,” in punctuation and went back to his paper.

Sherlock said mildly, “I’ll have a look around.”

“Go ahead,” the bartender said indifferently, not even glancing up from his paper.

Sherlock was sure now that the man was lying, for what reason he did not know. He was sure, because the paper he was reading was much-read and soiled. It had probably been here a week, and yet the man seemed engrossed in it.

“Maybe you better come along,” Sherlock suggested.

The man looked up swiftly, a bright anger passing in his eyes. “Maybe I better not, too.”

Sherlock stood there undecided. Suddenly, the faint sound of shouted laughter came to her from deep in the hotel somewhere, and she smiled. That could only be Irene Adler. She turned back into the lobby, and heard a movement behind her as the bartender ducked out from behind the bar.

Sherlock, heading for the rear of the building, passed through the dining room and opened the door into the kitchen. She saw a big laughing woman stoking the stove. Across the room, sitting in a chair back-tilted against the wall, was Irene Adler, hat shoved far back on her head, and she was grinning.

When she saw Sherlock the grin faded and for a moment she stared at her, her eyes startled. Then her chair came solidly to the floor, and she grinned again swiftly. “Old Teetotal Holmes,” she drawled, brushing her hat back. “How are you, kid?”

She came out of the chair with a lazy grace and delightedly shook hands with Sherlock. Her levis were patched and faded and she was wearing a blue wash-bleached shirt whose left arm was a faded khaki color. Some ranch woman had taken pity on her raggedness, using the only materials she had at hand to fix his sleeve. She was a slim young woman, not tall, with a gay, handsome face burned a near black by the sun. Her dark eyes looked past Sherlock now, and suddenly she burst into laughter. Sherlock turned to see the bartender, a shotgun slacked in his left hand, standing just outside the door.

“Georgie, this is a friend of mine, Sherlock Holmes. She’s all right.”

George gave a taciturn nod and faded back into the dining room. Irene regarded Sherlock closely, memory of the week they had spent in Signal bringing a grin to her face, and she said, “You’re off the reservation, kid.”

Sherlock said, “Let’s go outside,” nodding toward the back door. A sudden interest flickered in Irene’s dark eyes and she led the way out onto the sagging back porch. Sherlock sat down on the top step and Irene stood beside her, looking down at her. There was an openness about Irene Adler that few people could resist. Now, for instance, his eyes showed a real affection for Sherlock and he did not try to hide his feelings. He said, “You son of a gun, what did you want to go to work for? I’ve missed you.”

She sat down now alongside Sherlock, who took out her sack of tobacco and proffered it to Irene, who accepted it.

Irene rolled a smoke and gave the sack back, and Sherlock took out a paper. She said, “You on the dodge, Irene?” and looking at her, added, “I’ve got to know.”

Irene laughed again. “George? No. It’s nothin’ much. I kissed a lady’s girl is all, and George thought you might be her.”

Irene lighted their cigarettes and then Sherlock asked quietly, “How’d you like a job, Irene?”

Irene’s cheerfulness faded from her face, and she groaned. “You come up here for that? I still got some money. What do I want to work for?”

“There’s a fight in it.”

Irene’s interest quickened. “Yeah?”

“John Watson,” Sherlock said mildly, “is out to beat Harry — and Jim Moriarty.”

Irene’s expression was one of puzzlement, and Sherlock told her what had happened in Signal. She told of Mary Moristan’s ignominious flight, and John’s bitter decision to seek revenge.

Irene listened with a rapt attention, and when Sherlock was finished, she looked off across the yard at the stack of wood by a far shed. “What else?” she said.

“That’s all.”

“You ain’t fightin’ for pay,” Irene said calmly. “Me, I’d do it if I had the notion, but not you.”

“No,” Sherlock agreed, and she told of the fight with Phil Anderson in the saloon, and of Jim Moriarty’s calm warning. When she had finished she glanced over at Irene and found her grinning.

Irene said dryly, “You got a notion Moriarty can’t run you out, and you’re stickin’. Is that it?”

Sherlock nodded and Irene was silent, turning this over in her mind. Sherlock had said all she was going to say, and yet she wanted Irene Adler, for she knew the woman’s breed. She was shiftless and unreliable and cheerful, and she was not afraid of God or man. Her loyalty, Sherlock knew, couldn’t be bought with money; but if something fired her imagination she would be faithful as a dog. She knew the country like she knew her name, and beyond that she knew its politics and its shabby secrets. She was a born rebel with a hatred of towns and houses and men with too much power, a throwback to a freer time before money was everything.

Irene said suddenly, “John send you after me?”

“No.”

Irene looked at her thoughtfully. “Then you’re a shrewd woman, friend Sherlock.”

Sherlock, puzzled, said nothing and Irene smiled thinly. “Jim don’t like me. I worry him. I have too much fun. I don’t like him either. He makes too big tracks.”

“Maybe he does,” Sherlock agreed.

“Let’s take him apart and see,” Irene said, just as quietly.

“At my own time and under my orders, Irene,” Sherlock said. “That’s the way it’s got to be. If it isn’t, don’t take the job.”

Irene grinned and said, “That’s the way it’ll be, kid,” and Sherlock knew this was Irene’s promise. They smoked in silence for a moment, and then Sherlock said, “We’ll need a couple more hands, Irene.”

Irene laughed. “Hell, I know fifty men who’d work for nothin’ just for a crack at Moriarty.”

“That’s the kind I want. But they’ll have to pass with Greg Lestrade.”

Irene looked searchingly at her. “What’s Lestrade got to do with it?”

“Lestrade,” Sherlock said slowly, “is our blue chip. And we won’t buy him with cheap gun hands siding us.”

“But you want ‘em tough?”

“Just so they get past Lestrade,” Sherlock repeated.

Irene thought a moment and said, “How soon?”

“As soon as you can get them. And spread the word we’ll be buyin’ cows here at Relief in two days.”

Irene nodded and rose and said, “I’ll see you, kid,” and vanished around the corner of the hotel. Sherlock got up and walked to the corner and saw Irene heading toward the corral, her thin whistle cheerful in the deepening dusk.

She had just made, Sherlock knew, the first move in a sequence whose end she could not see. The pattern was old, and she did not like it. You hired a hard-case crew because you were fighting a hard-case crew, and if you could channel that violence with an iron will, you won in the end.

She watched until Irene rode out in the dusk, and she knew now it was too late to turn back.

###

 


End file.
